At first I read the headline as "Stick a small plungerINa chicken's ass" and I was all WTF are you perverts doing? Then I realized chicken's don't HAVE asses, per se. So... there's that. Still, I'm gonna make some popcorn in case any PETA types make the same mistake I did and come a-ragin' into this thread. Also, a nice stiff drink to erase that awful image from my brain.

cgraves67: Do you suppose bipedal dinosaurs bobbed their heads like chickens do too? That would make T. Rex a little less terrifying.

Probably. Lizards do that too, when they're looking around.

The bobbing of a birds head is more about flight control, they keep their head absolutely stationary, its their bodies that are moving technically. T-Rex possibly has some tiny bit of head bobbing, but I doubt they managed to keep their heads perfectly stationary.

MindStalker:The bobbing of a birds head is more about flight control, they keep their head absolutely stationary, its their bodies that are moving technically. T-Rex possibly has some tiny bit of head bobbing, but I doubt they managed to keep their heads perfectly stationary.

Any T-Rex near me can do whatever it damn well wants to.As long as I'm faster than you.

--TRex gets downgraded from upright vicious killer, to hunched over scavenger, then put back to hunter.--The Flintstones would have ordered Apatoburgers, since the Bronto never existed.

I don't think the 'T. rex was a pure scavenger' thing was ever really widely accepted. And the Flintstones never really existed either, so who cares what they call the dinosaur meat?

/Brontosaurus is still a better name.

Well the T rex as a scavenger thing was almost soley the theory of Jack Horner who was more or less mad that people always want to ask about T rex and he was mainly into dromaeosaurs. The are enough fossils of healed injuries with broken off T rex in prey species to say Horner was full of shiat.

Oldiron_79:LordJiro: fickenchucker: You know when you're getting old when:

--TRex gets downgraded from upright vicious killer, to hunched over scavenger, then put back to hunter.--The Flintstones would have ordered Apatoburgers, since the Bronto never existed.

I don't think the 'T. rex was a pure scavenger' thing was ever really widely accepted. And the Flintstones never really existed either, so who cares what they call the dinosaur meat?

/Brontosaurus is still a better name.

Well the T rex as a scavenger thing was almost soley the theory of Jack Horner who was more or less mad that people always want to ask about T rex and he was mainly into dromaeosaurs. The are enough fossils of healed injuries with broken off T rex in prey species to say Horner was full of shiat.

cgraves67:Do you suppose bipedal dinosaurs bobbed their heads like chickens do too? That would make T. Rex a little less terrifying.

I don't know. If you ever get a chance to get up and personal with a chicken, imagine them the size of a Tyrannosaur. They have a real reptilian look to them, and don't look like they would hesitate a second to make you lunch if they had the size advantage.

Now, I'm not saying you should be scared of chickens, but if you were bug sized, they'd pretty much be your worst nightmare. Bobbing head or not.

Skleenar:cgraves67: Do you suppose bipedal dinosaurs bobbed their heads like chickens do too? That would make T. Rex a little less terrifying.

I don't know. If you ever get a chance to get up and personal with a chicken, imagine them the size of a Tyrannosaur. They have a real reptilian look to them, and don't look like they would hesitate a second to make you lunch if they had the size advantage.

[imageshack.com image 749x500]Now, I'm not saying you should be scared of chickens, but if you were bug sized, they'd pretty much be your worst nightmare. Bobbing head or not.

It never occurred to me that birds are dinosaurs until I read that perhaps 10 years ago. Now I can't unsee the dinosaur face in a plain old chicken.

Admittedly, the last time that synapsids like us were noshing on dinosaurs regularly, it was pretty far back when both we and the dinosaurs bore a bit more of a resemblance to warm-blooded not-lizards right at the Permian-Triassic boundary, but... :D

(Yes, it's well within reason that some of our ancestors ate dinosaurs. The line of therapsids that eventually spawned mammaliforms (including us)--the cynodonts--did make it past the Great Dying, and probably did catch and eat the earliest dinosaurs and dinosauromorphs.)

It's also well within reason that possibly one day birds could take the Top Predator Spot back if another major extinction event happened...oh, something like the extinction event that wiped out pretty much all the dinosaurs except for the theropod insectivorous-bat-analogues. (I'll note, for the record, that synapsids and archosauromorphs have been swapping the Top Predator spot back and forth almost from the time that amniotes forked from the rest of the Tetrapoda and the "Reptilia" (sensu Squamata) and synapsids forked from each other.)

cgraves67:Do you suppose bipedal dinosaurs bobbed their heads like chickens do too? That would make T. Rex a little less terrifying.

Chickens bob their heads because their eyes are on opposite sides. Like most predators, T. rex has forward-facing eyes and thus wouldn't need to bob it's heads because it would have had 3-d vision and wouldn't need to keep its head level with the ground to see around it without everything becoming a blur while it moves forward..